‘We need to science the hell out of ovarian longevity’

On World Menopause Day, Martin Varsavsky and Stasa Stankovic discuss innovations and challenges in female reproductive longevity.

Ovarian longevity, a critical subject affecting half of the world’s population, is finally gaining attention due to its significant implications for fertility, menopause and women’s overall health. With birth rates declining and women’s healthspans increasing, scientists and investors are now focused on aligning menopause with this extended lifespan. However, the field faces several challenges, including limited knowledge about women’s reproductive health, a broken drug discovery pipeline and a pressing need for better diagnostic and therapeutic solutions.

My take on this: There are many advancing research areas in in the reproductive longevity field; advancements in genetic diagnostics and gene therapies offer new insights, while innovations such as induced pluripotent stem cells and 3D ovarian cell models hold promise for delaying menopause, extending fertility and addressing age-related diseases. However, there are the complexities of navigating regulatory pathways and the need for increased education, research funding and early intervention.

We sat down with Martin Varsavsky , Founder and Chairman of Gameto, and Stasa Stankovic , a reproductive geneticist and co-founder of OvartiX, to explore the future of ovarian aging and the critical need for a more profound understanding of how later menopause impacts women’s health.

Dr Martin Varsavsky on a woman’s lot

Our idea is to use induced pluripotent stem cells to make ovarian cells. The therapeutic objective is delaying menopause because the ovaries age much sooner than the rest of the woman’s body, and that’s what we’re trying to address.

The life of women especially has been unfairly punished – we’re in a lifestyle in which we’re asking women to study and then to work, but their window to be fertile is so small. If we could make ovarian cells that would make the body believe that it is younger, because for some reason we don’t understand, ovaries age so much sooner than the rest of the woman – and that’s what we’re trying to address.

Dr Stasa Stankovic on changing the paradigm

And women’s health has been underfunded and understudied and under-everything for a very long time. And, unfortunately for women’s health, and especially female reproductive health, the drug discovery pipeline has been broken for a very long time due to lack of data and inferior models.

And this is where genetics was extremely revolutionary because for the very first time, we have a large scale data set of over half a million women, and at the University of Cambridge we are working to crack the genetic code for fertility and reproduction. This is leading us to some very interesting targets in both the diagnostic space as well as therapeutic.

Watch the full video HERE.

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